The death toll from the fires in Los Angeles has risen to 24, with dozens of people still missing. More than 12,000 homes and other structures have been destroyed or damaged as firefighters continue to battle the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst fires. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone says the risk of new fires remains high.

Anthony Marrone: “Elevated critical fire weather conditions will continue through Wednesday. Please rest assured that your County of Los Angeles Fire Department will be prepared. These winds, combined with low humidities and low fuel moistures, will keep the fire threat in all of Los Angeles County very high.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Los Angeles County have both declared public health emergencies due to the smoke and particulate matter from the ongoing wildfires.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has sent a team of Mexican firefighters to Los Angeles. Laura Vázquez Alzúa is the head of Mexico’s Civil Protection.

Laura Vázquez Alzúa: “We will stay as long as necessary. We will support in a spirit of solidarity and with all our experience and commitment to the people of California.”

As of Friday, nearly 1,000 incarcerated firefighters had also been deployed to help fight the L.A. fires. According to state officials, the incarcerated firefighters are paid a daily rate of between $5.80 to $10.24. Meanwhile, many wealthy residents in Los Angeles are hiring private firefighters who cost as much as $2,000 an hour to protect their property.

Authorities in Gaza say more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed or went missing in the first 100 days of Israel’s siege on northern Gaza, which began in early October. Another 9,500 Palestinians have been injured, and 2,600 have been detained. In a statement, Gaza’s government media office said, “In the past 100 days, our people in northern Gaza have suffered the most horrific forms of killing, ethnic cleansing, destruction, and displacement.” This comes as talks continue over a possible ceasefire and hostage deal. Reuters reports Qatar gave Israel and Hamas a final draft of a deal earlier today. President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Sunday.

But Israel is continuing to attack Gaza. Earlier today, Israel bombed a school in Gaza City, killing five displaced Palestinians. On Saturday, Israel struck a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing at least eight people, including two children and two women.

On Saturday, a funeral was held for the Palestinian journalist Saed Abu Nabhan, who was shot dead by Israeli forces on Friday. He was a freelance cameraman for the Anadolu news agency. This is his colleague Mohammed Abu Namous.

Mohammed Abu Namous: “It is clear that the Israeli occupation wants to target the journalist body that exposes its crimes, while the occupation had utilized its media to say that they only target the resistance and their weapons, until the Palestinian journalists have exposed the truth to the world, saying that this occupation targets children, women and unarmed civilians.”

The government of Poland has adopted a resolution to protect Benjamin Netanyahu from arrest if he attends a major event in Poland this month to mark 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. In November, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza.

On Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan sentenced President-elect Donald Trump to an unconditional discharge in Trump’s 2016 election subversion hush money case. This means Trump will avoid jail time or probation despite being convicted by a jury on 34 felony charges. It also means Trump will enter the White House as the first president with a felony conviction. This is Judge Merchan.

Judge Juan Merchan: “After careful analysis in obedience to governing mandates and pursuant to the rule of law, this court has determined that the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge, which the New York state Legislature has determined is a lawful and permissible sentence for the crime of falsifying business records in the first degree.”

Donald Trump appeared before the judge remotely and criticized the sentence.

President-elect Donald Trump: “It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election. And obviously that didn’t work. And the people of our country got to see this firsthand, because they watched the case in your courtroom.”

In other Trump news, special counsel Jack Smith has resigned from the Department of Justice. This comes as Trump continues to fight to block the release of Smith’s final report on his criminal investigations into Trump.

Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s nominees begin Tuesday, when the Senate Armed Services Committee considers Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host tapped by Trump to become defense secretary. Hegseth will likely face questions over accusations that he raped a woman in 2017 at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth claimed the encounter was consensual, but he later paid the woman as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Hegseth’s own mother has called him “an abuser of women.”

Also on Tuesday, confirmation hearings will be held for interior secretary nominee Doug Burgum and veterans affairs secretary nominee Doug Collins.

The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to uphold a law that would ban TikTok starting January 19 unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it to a U.S. buyer. Backers of the TikTok ban claim the popular social media app, which has some 170 million users in the U.S., is a national security risk. Critics of the ban say it’s motivated by anti-Chinese sentiment, threatens free speech, and warn it threatens the livelihoods of many content creators and small business owners who rely on TikTok.

In more Supreme Court news, the justices agreed to review the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s no-cost coverage for a number of preventive care services, including some cancer screenings, HIV prevention drugs and heart statins.

Sudan says its military has recaptured the key city of Wad Madani from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira province, fell to the RSF over a year ago.

The devastating 21-month civil war has killed over 28,000 people and displaced more than 11 million. The U.N. says famine in Sudan has now spread to five regions, with over 750,000 people on the brink of starvation. Meanwhile, Doctors Without Borders announced Friday it was suspending operations at one of Khartoum’s main hospitals after its workers repeatedly came under attack.

The prime minister of Greenland said he is open to dialogue with incoming U.S. President Trump but maintained Greenland is focused on its independence amid Trump’s continued threats to take control over the territory. This is Prime Minister Múte Egede.

Prime Minister Múte Egede: “The desire for independence, the desire to be in one’s own house, is probably understood by all people in the world. And that struggle from Greenland’s side isn’t new. It didn’t just happen yesterday. It didn’t happen when I gave the New Year’s speech. But things have developed in that direction for many, many years, at least for many decades. … We don’t want to be Danes. We don’t want to be Americans. We want to be Greenlandic. And, of course, it is the Greenlandic people who decide their future.”

Trump’s threats toward Greenland have shone a spotlight on the territory’s push to gain full independence from Denmark, which has long been accused of committing colonial abuses against its mostly Inuit population.

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in for a third term Friday in a ceremony held five months after a controversial election that the opposition claimed to have won. A number of Latin American leaders skipped Maduro’s inauguration, including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Gustavo Petro of Colombia. The inauguration ceremony was held a day after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was briefly detained. As Maduro was being sworn in, the Biden administration announced it would offer a $25 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest.

The Biden administration has extended Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan for 18 months. The relief shields people from deportation, though it doesn’t provide a path to citizenship.

Immigration officials have postponed a planned check-in with the New York immigrant rights leader Ravi Ragbir, who feared he could soon be deported. The check-in which was scheduled for today has been pushed back until mid-March. This comes as Ragbir is seeking a presidential pardon before Biden leaves office in a week. Click here to see our interviews with Ravi Ragbir.

The Justice Department concluded the 1921 Tulsa race massacre was a “coordinated, military-style attack” as the agency released the findings of its investigation, announced last fall. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white rioters murdered an estimated 300 Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood neighborhood, known as Black Wall Street, and looted and destroyed their homes and businesses.

The report also states there are no living perpetrators for the Justice Department to prosecute. The last two remaining survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle — both 110 years old — have been seeking justice and reparations for years. Last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their case.

A Columbia Law School professor who vocally defended students after they faced persecution from Columbia for protesting in support of Palestinian rights says she was terminated after 25 years in her job. Katherine Franke accused Columbia’s administration of creating a “toxic and hostile” environment for debate and of failing to protect its students and faculty. Columbia was at the center of a firestorm around campus protests for Gaza last year after it violently cracked down on student demonstrations, calling in the NYPD to dismantle a peaceful encampment.

Former Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who last year also gave a disastrous congressional testimony on Capitol Hill, ultimately resigned. U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese decried Franke’s termination, saying she was “yet another victim of the pro-Israelism that is turning universities, and other spaces of public life, into places of obscurantism, discrimination and oppression.” Click here to see our interviews with Katherine Franke about this case and more.

The founder of the Young Lords, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, has died at the age of 76. In the 1960s, Jiménez turned a Chicago street gang into a Puerto Rican political organization inspired by the Black Panthers.

José “Cha Cha” Jiménez: “So, the Young Lords were a gang in the Lincoln Park neighborhood that first came in there and was being beaten up by other existing ethnic gangs at first and felt the need to organize. So they were a gang. And then, in 1968, we reorganized. I was the president of the group then. And I kind of led — I was a catalyst for reorganizing the group into a political movement, modeled after the Black Panther Party because we wanted the same concept, but in the Puerto Rican community.”

After starting in Chicago, the Young Lords would expand to New York and other cities. Jiménez also worked closely with Black Panther Fred Hampton before Hampton was assassinated by the FBI in 1969.